The present invention is directed towards a portable dual-interface data carrier, containing a metal sheet, which can be provided with low technical effort and especially no ferrite material is required. The resulting portable dual-interface data carrier is heavier than a state of the art PVC smart card and provides contact based interface on one side, whereas contactless interface is working from both sides of the card. One application domain of the data carrier is to provide a so-called smartcard. The present invention is furthermore directed towards a dual-interface module as well as towards a method for providing a portable dual-interface data carrier. Moreover, a data carrier is suggested comprising instructions for performing the suggested method and for manufacturing the portable dual-interface data carrier.
DE 10 2010 005 809 A1 shows a portable data carrier comprising a contactless interface made of an antenna coil. In this context metal layers are discussed.
WO 1993/023 826 A1 teaches a portable data carrier in the form of a smartcard. This publication also discusses metal layers and implied effects.
It is commonly known to provide a so-called dual-interface data carrier for payment and authentication application scenarios in the form of a smartcard. A smartcard is a typically PVC-based credit card comprising further processing components for performing control instructions and memories. Moreover, typical smartcards provide a dual-interface for contactless and contact-based communication.
Several manufacturing methods are commonly known, which perform lamination of respective layers towards a card body. However, a problem of known data carriers is that in case metal layers are involved, a specific interference may occur in combination with the antenna as discussed in the art.
To overcome such a problem, the known art suggests providing a slit in a metal layer in the position of a module such that the metal layer is discontinuous through and communication from both sides can occur. The slit commonly known in the art is very small and needs to be only of a size small enough to allow data communication. However, there is a disadvantage that the metal layer as such becomes instable and accordingly, the card body may break upon forces for instance in daily usage. Furthermore, such an arrangement requires a specific dual-interface module being cost-intense and which can be provided only at high technical effort.
A further solution known in the art considering interferences is that on the back of the metal layer a ferrite layer is provided for avoidance of such interferences. However, there is a disadvantage that such a ferrite layer allows the card to communicate wirelessly only over one side of the card. The other side of the card is not communicating with the RF field by shielding caused by the metal layer.
This results in further problems, namely that the ferrite layer is cost-intense and as the communication of the antenna is restricted to one side of the card, the user may find such a card inconvenient.